Monday, August 20, 2012

The State of SEO and Internet Marketing in 2012


I listened in on a fabulous webinar today conducted  by Rand Fishkin (@randfish), CEO + Co-founder of SEOmoz and Dharmesh Shah (@dharmesh), CTO of HubSpot. They delivered information on The State of SEO and Internet Marketing in 2012. SEOmoz conducted an SEO-related industry survey that saw 6,491 respondents provide detailed answers to 53 unique questions. The survey formally ran from March 21 to May18, 2012. From independent consultants to agency SEOs to in-house marketers, HubSpot got to see responses from a wide swath of the industry's demographics. Individuals from more than 100 countries contributed.

In the one-hour webinar, there were tons of nuggets of great information. The Twitter Hashtag is #StateofSEO but be careful when you review the posts – it appears that spammers saw it trending toward the end and starting posting some obscene content. Be sure to look at some of the earlier tweets from 1:05 – 1:55 pm EST (8/20/12).

Take-aways: 
  • Google gets 3 billion-plus searches/day and 75% of all clicks go to SEO (organic) links
  • As soon as you stop paying for search ads, they go away. SEO is an enduring asset (investment)
  • There are a lot of SEO opportunities in multi-channel distribution if done right. 
  • Nearly 20% of people were fighting against the PANDA update and now companies are fighting against PENGUIN. 
    • PANDA is all about the content on your website and the near duplication of content – you don’t want to have “biotech law Philadelphia pa”,  “bitech law chester pa”, “bitech law bryn mawr pa.” 
    • PENGUIN – this is all about links and if you are building them, manipulating them, purchasing links, etc., all of which is considered a big no no. 
  • Exact Match Domains are dying slowly – it is much better to invest in the brand and building the brand.
  • Shrinking domain diversity – when you search you will find a lot of links to the same website (check out weather 98122 on Google).
  • There are massive opportunities in Polls, Surveys, Video, Audio and Whitepapers when it comes to SEO.
  • Media mentions are extremely important for SEO.
  • Detailed contact information is an essential brand signal for SEO.
  • Need to be listed in all SEO registered official bodies for better SEO (Better Business Bureau, etc.).
  • Slow, steady and authentic content is much more valuable to SEO than quick blasts of a lot of content.
  • Google rewards real businesses that provide real value.
  • You need to have a Google+ profile – there is a trend that they are going to become extremely powerful in search results and directly biasing the rankings.
  • With fewer companies showing up in SERPS, solid and consistent branding is essential.
  • Most bloggers are being measured so share good content.
  • Guest bloggers are a great way to increase value of content and traffic.
  • Blog comments are a great way to build reputation but you should not use it for link building – add value to the conversation – don’t just comment for commenting sake.
  • Predictions: Mobile will change marketing and Facebook will dominate the social field.
  • The most popular inbound marketing action for 2012 was setting up a Facebook business page.
SEO Tips:
  • In order to be in the top results, everything you post should answer “does this make me more rank worthy?”.
  • A faster speed on your website makes it more SEO friendly. Whatever changes you make should happen site-wide. 
  • Need to make sure your website is crawl-able but most websites have major problems in their design – need to get the basics right first.
  • High performance websites lead to higher visitor engagement, retention and conversations.
  • Have a third party review your website regularly.
  • Pay it forward – promote the promoters.
  • One of the best things you can possibly do for SEO is create some incentive to share your content (anything but direct payment) (Example “People love us on Yelp” sticker) – try to build in an incentive structure (survey).
  • If you’re new to SEO, start with the long tails where other people are not ranking yet then move up that chain which will get you better long-term results.
  • Don’t beg influencers to share content, involve them (ex: include them and tell them in research/content).
  • Don’t just go for rankings, aim for click-through rate (CTR) – use images, dates, rich snippets, meta descriptions, etc. 
  • Create content that delights and surprises users. This should be required for every piece of copy. 
  • Get transcripts of your programs and use them on your websites and blogs – they are great for SEO.
Resources mentioned:

2 comments:

takeshi007 said...
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Shane Castane said...

The basic thing that is used in order to increase the search visibility of a website using the search engine marketing is the finding of keywords. The website is thoroughly scanned and the mostly used and most relevant keyword is filtered out, this filtered word is then overlapped with the most widely searched key word that relates to the same category. The idea that search engine marketing uses here is that when that specific keyword is searched, the website to be promoted is brought amongst the top results when searched. Hence, the purpose that is to be achieved using search engine marketing is fulfilled and the website is likely to get most reviews.
webbyrå is also a way of promoting the product, and is a very popular form of internet marketing. By far it webbdesign for the visibility level of the website that is to be promoted.

Getting a review of link popularity is also a very dominating factor of the search engine marketing, for a website to be promoted; the promoters need to have an overview that how many pages of a certain site are viewed. The more the viewers, the more the chances are to be amongst the most viewed and searched websites in the popular search engines. The websites that are amongst the top ten tend to have the highest popularity level and viewer feedback. It also depends on the content and data that a certain website contains.